Floating solar power array on hydropower plant
cleantechnica.com
cleantechnica.com
https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/masdar-and-pln-adva...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cirata_Dam
https://web.archive.org/web/20120319212438/http://www.ieahyd...
> The existing array went online and was proclaimed successful just last month. Evidently Masdar and the state-owned Indonesian utility PLN (Nusantara Power) already liked what they saw, because they used the occasion of COP 28 to announce the new expansion on December 3.
[0] https://www.reuters.com/business/environment/california-cove...
I believe the canal structure is elevated. Which might be initially more expensive for the scaffolding, but it strikes me as fewer long term complications vs direct water contact. Fewer worries about algae growth on the panels, shorts developing at the connection points, etc.
I dont think it's quite appreciated enough how well hydropower - including existing hydropower installations and new ones like snowy 2's 350 GWh battery - helps offset the variability of solar and wind.
Not everything has to be offset with a lithium ion battery pack or an overpriced nuclear power station.
In practice, the area of Lake Mead is about 250 square miles = ~160k acres * (~200 kW/acre) = ~30 GW of potential peak generating capacity. This means that a solar farm covering Lake Mead would immediately become the largest power plant in the world at peak output, surpassing the Three Gorges Dam (hydro) by almost 50%. It would be more than a quarter of all solar capacity existing in the United States as of 2022. So the overall electricity sector may not be ready for such an undertaking.
Partial cover is more feasible at this point, eventually extending to the entire lake, hopefully.
A study by the University of California, Merced gives a boost to the idea, estimating that 63 billion gallons of
water could be saved by covering California’s 4,000 miles of canals with solar panels that could also generate 13
gigawatts of power.
Their use in Los Angeles was covered in a Veritasium video that was all over YouTube for a while (97M views): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uxPdPpi5W4o
The estimate given when they were added in 2015 – in the middle of a record drought – was that they would prevent the loss of 300 million gallons of water each year.
Could be great for drinking-water reservoirs though.
if freezing and big waves/storms wasn't a problem, the Great Lakes obv. but with so much flat underused land in the west, putting these in water might not make so much sense. unless there are economies of being able to produce them completely in a factory with a dock and then float them into place. but unpredictable, violent storms seem like a huge asterisk.
If you refuse to accept the argument that people should have a say in how their life is changed, can you at least explain why this is a bad thing that doesn't require the context of the ultra-wealthy?
In cases where the reservoir was financed by selling pretty properties at the shore, then the whole thing is a non-starter anyways since the former would make it very easy to just sue the utility company should they touch the lake.
However, most people will only ever buy one house. Or at the very least, they'll only ever own one house at a time (small legal overlaps not withstanding). It's a completely different story. That's all I'm saying.
*: the place where I grew up now has a factory next to it. It's unsightly, though it could have been much much worse, and sometimes noisy, but at least my parents at least can now also enjoy remote heating at ok-ish conditions. And it's nothing compared to the major pre-existing road immediately next to their house.
But hey, whatever saves you another few hundred bucks on your tax bill right?
This is a great point. Many of those reservoirs included recreation benefits in the accounting that led to them being funded in the first place, so it may not be trivial to impinge on them.
>in the west, putting these in water might not make so much sense.
OTOH, evaporation is also a big problem there (roughly a couple million acre-feet/year in the Colorado drainage, from memory) so mitigating that would be beneficial.
https://thehill.com/changing-america/sustainability/energy/3...
> A 2018 study from the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) estimated that installing floating solar installations on the more than 24,000 human-made reservoirs in the U.S. could produce around 10 percent of the nation’s annual electricity production.
More reading:
https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.est.8b04735 ("Floating Photovoltaic Systems: Assessing the Technical Potential of Photovoltaic Systems on Man-Made Water Bodies in the Continental United States")
https://www.nrel.gov/docs/fy22osti/80695.pdf ("Floating Photovoltaic System Cost Benchmark: Q1 2021 Installations on Artificial Water Bodies")
https://www.nrel.gov/docs/fy22osti/83149.pdf ("Enabling Floating Solar Photovoltaic (FPV) Deployment: Exploring the Operational Benefits of Floating Solar-Hydropower Hybrids")
Not for long.
Not to pick on you but a lot of the energy conversations on HN seem based on the premise that the entire world has the climate of upstate New York.
Hydropower plants are already permitted and connected generators. They are allowed to produce energy for sale onto the grid. From the utility's perspective, adding solar to a hydropower plant is the same as if there was a year with extra rainfall - the maximum (and reserve) power limits will still be adhered to, but more total energy will come from that single source.
(Note that solar on the ground right next to the hydropower plant would have the same benefits without the additional costs of floating, but often hydropower plants are built in geographies that are more challenging for ground-mounted solar - they're either extremely hilly or built out.)
Wikipedia lists early deployments and the ramp up of production seems to mirror other solar uptake suggesting the early ones proved the concept enough to get the next generation built.
This particular deployment in Indonesia is a knock-on side effect of how cheap it's getting for everyone!
The argument for floating is and was: available, generally unshadowed land, already flat, with power connection often already there, and lower deployment.
So what’s different now? I’d love for this to succeed.
PV now costs less for everyone. That can and seems to make the difference in whether industrial scale deployment is cheap enough for commercial entities to invest.
Or maybe this was just a novel although simple idea: Use the pool at powerplants to put the cells there. Maybe powerplants didn't think of it because they were opposed to solar ideologically.
I’d also guess that shear will to think outside the box has increased. We’ve seen some things the last 15 years when it comes to the actual effects of climate change. The 15 years prior to that the climate change story could still be denied (by some) and I’d argue that now we’ve all seen and felt it and it’s pretty undeniable (without some bias).
Why the need to add complexity? Putting panels onto domestic rooftops, trying to construct roadways with panels, floating panels on bodies of water, adding tracking mechanics, adding active cooling systems, etc. - all increase installation and maintenance costs and decrease reliability and simplicity. I just don't see what the problems are that these efforts are trying to solve.
Some of these people are farmers who object to having to pay market rates to buy or lease land, and should be told precisely where to get off. But farmers are a politically protected species.
https://www.energysage.com/solar/solar-panels-hail-hurricane...
I imagine they simply design for floating panels just as they have designed the installations in all other settings.
Besides I'm sure fish won't like decreased oxygen levels storm or no storm.
Artificial islands exists, but need constant upkeep (adding more material as it's eroded/reclaimed by the sea). Those don't float, they're anchored to the sea bed. Things that do float need even more upkeep, because a larger part of their surface area comes in contact with saltwater, which is very good at ruining everything it touches. Ship maintenance is expensive. Floating city maintenance would be staggeringly expensive. I can imagine it being nearly as complex as building a city on the moon.
You have to be stuck somewhere where you're exceptionally short on land for expansion into water to make sense.
Seriously, though, a lot of big cities are or were ports, have centres near the coast, and are constrained from growing further inland by geological features or transport time. Extending those cities out to sea, by reclamation or on floats, is at least superficially appealing.
Most people with any familiarity with engineering or marine environments would find the concept of floating cities as a terribly impractical idea, at first look, do the cost and complexity. It would make far more sense to build a city in a desert and build a megaproject to bring it water from the ocean.
I would agree floating cities has some sci-fi fantasy appeal. cool setting for a book or cartoon, where one could ignore the real implications. Not unlike space stations or moon bases in that respect.
Reclamation could be interesting in a limited number of circumstances but realistically we would be better served by improving transit inland. Even in Europe, there is a ton of room for improvement to connect rural areas to cities which would alleviate much of the burden that people feel to live closer to work and commerce.
An exaggeration, but the point is that floating-stuff has a whole bunch of maintenance headaches and extra-expenses which most people don't anticipate, and I imagine the problem will be _even worse_ when it comes to floating city houses/blocks.